After visiting the competetors' websites, I'm most convinced by Scaled Industries, given their track record and progress on the actual craft. Armadillo looks like they're on to something, but Scaled's design just makes a lot of sense. I hope they all get to space, because I'd love to see a some competition after the prize is awarded, but my vote is on SS1.

Perhaps winning the X-prize isnt even that important in the long run, if the team is committed to the real goal: going into space tourism vehicle building and flying business.
Yes, 10M is a nice bonus, and the publicity you get is well worth pushing for. But in the long run the systems have to justify themselves economically anyways. And i think Armadillo has some real sound concepts for scaling the vehicles up with relatively little effort, and keeping it in at cheap operational cost at the same time.

SS1 for instance will require changing hybrid motor core between flights, and to get a bigger SS1 for accomodating more passengers or going higher you have to build bigger carrier aircraft too.

Maybe a little off-topic, but the 'aerospace hardware on-the-cheap" company that impresses me more than any of the others is one not even in the x-prize competition:x-cor. Considering the company has only existed for four years, does everything in-house and sometimes by hand(?!), the progress that they've made and the degree of their absolutely ground-breaking acheivements are simply BREATHTAKING . They're not after the x-prize, but I look for them to come up big when the x-cup gets underway! And hey, their test pilots Rutan's brother and their 'proof-of-concept' test-bed is a modified Long-EZ-Who's for the Rutan's as the 'Father's of space travel'!(Did I mention one of interorbital's team used to work for scaled composits? And doesn't one of the companies contracted for work on Space-ship One also have it's OWN x-prize proposal?)

One more question-has anybody seen the article in the new issue of 'Popular Science' about the race to develop 'pulse-jet' engines? Isn't that the concept nick-named the 'air-breathing rocket'? Sounds like they're pretty close-just wait till THAT concept takes off, especially the company developing a 'valveless' version.

1. The small vehicle is almost ready to fly again: "We did a water test on the small vehicle to check everything out, since it has been sitting around for over four months now. Everything is working perfectly, and we should be good to go as soon as we get some 90% peroxide. Don Stark’s concentrator has been having a lot of teething problems, but we still expect an initial shipment any time now."

2. "We bought a used Russian space suit on Ebay. Our plan has always been to have a pressurized cabin, but an extra layer of safety is probably justified if we can get this working without too much trouble. It has a few holes that will need patching, but most of the material looks in good shape. We will have to fabricate some adapters to go from the Russian fittings to AN fittings, but that shouldn’t be a problem."

1. The small vehicle is almost ready to fly again: "We did a water test on the small vehicle to check everything out, since it has been sitting around for over four months now. Everything is working perfectly, and we should be good to go as soon as we get some 90% peroxide. Don Stark’s concentrator has been having a lot of teething problems, but we still expect an initial shipment any time now."

2. "We bought a used Russian space suit on Ebay. Our plan has always been to have a pressurized cabin, but an extra layer of safety is probably justified if we can get this working without too much trouble. It has a few holes that will need patching, but most of the material looks in good shape. We will have to fabricate some adapters to go from the Russian fittings to AN fittings, but that shouldn’t be a problem." Click herefor a picture of the space suit.

After visiting the competetors' websites, I'm most convinced by Scaled Industries, given their track record and progress on the actual craft. Armadillo looks like they're on to something, but Scaled's design just makes a lot of sense. I hope they all get to space, because I'd love to see a some competition after the prize is awarded, but my vote is on SS1.

I whole heartedly agree with personaljazz on this one. Rutan's team is miles ahead of the competition in terms of experience. The Armadillo team has Carmack but they'll need more than a game programmer to make it in to space. I watched a video of a test launch of their vehicle on their site and all I can say is I wouldn't want to be the guy signed up to ride in that suicide sled.

OK, maybe I don't believe they will do it myself, but there is nothing that would make me happier than for Armadillo Aerospace to successfully send someone to space and prove all of their critics wrong.

I just love that Armadillo updates the public weekly on their progress (and frustrations). Some of the other teams look so refined simply because they don't tell us about their setbacks.